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This is how Veronica sees Riverdale at night:

The town is bathed in blue, the sky like ink spreading across a page. The only lights come from the murky halo of streetlamps and the all-night neon of the diner. The rose bushes look like blood against jade-green hedges; every crunch of gravel under tires sounds like the rattle of bones. She thinks she could fall in love with Riverdale at nighttime, the kind of consuming, harrowing love of a Daphne du Maurier protagonist.

Betty comes to her at night. Finally, fatefully, she appears at Veronica’s doorstep, eyes wide and glassy, hair and clothes dripping in the rain. Her little car is idling at the curb, the only car on the downtown streets, and Veronica thinks, this is it. This is how it’s supposed to be—me and Betty. And the rest of this town can burn.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” Betty says, voice barely audible over the sound of thunder rolling in the distance, but Veronica heard her correctly.

“No,” Veronica says flatly. She doesn’t hold the door open for Betty or invite her inside like a good hostess, like a good friend. “That’s ridiculous.”

She can still taste Betty on her lips, is the thing. Tastes Betty’s skin and the musk between her thighs. Sees her in the rosy lamplight of Betty’s childhood bedroom. She can’t have this conversation when she can still feel the echo of Betty’s fingers in her cunt.

“I don’t know what we are,” Betty says, voice breaking, but all Veronica can hear is I don’t know what I am. “And I don’t know what to do about Archie, about Jughead…and my parents—“

“We don’t have to be anything,” Veronica says. She reaches for Betty, wants to hold her close, but Betty shies away, which hurts more than anything. “We’re just B and V. I love you, Betty.”

Betty looks up, right into Veronica’s eyes. The rain falls harder, skidding in sheets down the sidewalk, and Betty just stares at her, like she’s never heard the words without a catch before. “You wouldn’t love me,” she says, scrubbing wet tendrils of hair out of her eyes, “if you really knew me.” Her eyes squeeze shut, face contorting, and she turns and runs down the steps of Pembrooke before Veronica can see her break down.

Veronica is after her without a second thought. The rain hits her like a truck, sending a shiver deep into her bones, and her bare feet catch angrily on the slick stone walkway. Betty is fumbling with her keys, body hunched over by the driver’s side door, when Veronica yanks her around by the shoulder. She slams into the door, eyes widening with surprise, and Veronica ducks in and kisses her, hands cupping the back of Betty’s neck, the length of their bodies pressed hot and skin-tight together.

This is supposed to be their moment, their big, romantic, in-the-rain Spiderman kiss (minus being upside down). But instead of slowing it down, letting that streetlamp glow soften their edges, Veronica worries Betty’s bottom lip between her teeth and bites, the copper tang of blood mixing with rainwater in her mouth. Her hand finds the curve of Betty’s breast beneath her sopping cardigan and Veronica squeezes, seeking a cold-hardened nipple in the dip of her palm.

“Do you really think I wouldn’t love you?” Veronica cups Betty’s face in her hands, forcing her to look, to see the desperate hurt in her eyes. “Try me.”

“I need to,” Betty starts, the words a wild gasp as Veronica’s hand tightens on her breast, “I need to unlock the car.” Her keys clatter out of her hand and fall onto the pavement. She wraps her arms around Veronica; she’s in the street while Veronica is on the sidewalk, the curb putting six inches of height between them, and Betty scrabbles at Veronica’s robe, trying to tug her down. “We need to get in the car.”

Veronica pulls back to pluck the keys off the ground. Betty’s knees are shaking, knocking like some bobbysoxer at her first school dance. Veronica knows she’s probably just cold, but it still makes her ache. She unlocks the back door of the car on the third try and ignores the annoying beeping from the center console telling them to put on seatbelts. Chucking the keys onto the passenger seat, Veronica slides in on the beige leather seats and pulls Betty in after her.

She kicks the door closed with her bare foot, leaving a perfect ten-toe print above the interior handle.

*

The car windows fog over the second Betty takes her shirt off and bares herself to Veronica’s hungry gaze. They’re safe in their cocoon of four-door lust, the rain pounding around them, lightning illuminating a strand of dripping hair, the curve of a shoulder, the swollen bud of a nipple.

Betty wriggles down onto the floor, knees spread out over the small center console in the backseat. Her skirt is unzipped and falling loose around her hips, but neither of them bother to tug it all the way off. “I want to do it like last time,” she says, and she wants to be confident about it, Veronica can tell, but she flushes red and averts her eyes.

Veronica grasps her chin between thumb and forefinger, forcing her gaze upwards. “Then do it,” she says plainly. She spreads her legs; she’d just gotten out of the bath and isn’t wearing anything but her robe and a long tee shirt. A shudder wracks through her body when her hot, wet cunt is exposed to the rain-chill of the car. “Put your mouth on me like last time.”

Last time, they were warm and safe in Betty’s room, two pretty dolls in the messed-up Cooper dollhouse, all smiles and giggles and polite little orgasms, like they were too afraid of anything else. Veronica was going to make sure this time was better.

Betty leans in, lips already parted. “Wait,” Veronica says. She slides the dark satin belt of her bathrobe out of its loops. “Do you want it exactly like last time?”

Betty didn’t know what to do with her hands the first time. She clenched the bedspread in her fists, scored her nails down Veronica’s hips, held them uselessly at her sides while her mouth worked at Veronica’s cunt.

Veronica holds Betty’s wrists while Betty eats her out, her hands tied together in a rose-colored knot like a gift from Victoria’s Secret. It’s a little awkward, and it must be tight for Betty, the way she’s leaning forward while Veronica holds up her arms. But every time Veronica tugs at the knotted silk, Betty groans into her cunt, the sound vibrating all the way up through Veronica’s clit.

Veronica closes her eyes and sinks down onto Betty’s mouth, legs spread wide. Betty is unpracticed, her mouth a little too slack and wet, but she makes up for it with enthusiasm. The broad flat of her tongue gives Veronica something to grind against, and when Betty licks into her in a firm rhythm, Veronica goes weak for it, lets her spine turn to liquid as she comes. It’s been building too long, ever since Betty was pressed up against her car door, and it’s a sweet release made even sweeter when Betty looks up at her, pupils blown, face still buried between Veronica’s thighs.

“Get up here,” Veronica says, releasing Betty’s wrists. She’s too breathless to be commanding, but Betty follows easily. She scrambles up onto the seat, wiping her mouth with her wrist, but before she can make her next move, Veronica tugs her so she sprawled over her lap. Veronica doesn’t want them on equal ground yet. She wants the upper hand, needs it.

She pauses for a moment, allows Betty to voice her concerns, but the car is just filled with the sounds of their mingled, anticipatory breathing.

“You don’t get to tell me I wouldn’t love you,” Veronica says. Her voice is foreign to her—vicious and heated, brimming with a raw emotion she’s not yet ready to address. She runs her hands along the backs of Betty’s thighs and bunches the soaked material of her skirt in her fist. She pulls her skirt up, the material clinging to the bare small of Betty’s back, the pale curve of her ass exposed to Veronica’s eyes and hands. Her hands are still tied together in front of her, rendering her immobile.

I’ve never done this before, Veronica thinks, letting it startle her, but she won’t say it out loud. The first smack of her hand against Betty’s ass is astronomically loud, louder than their thoughts, and Betty cries out desperately, sweetly. So Veronica does it again, teeth grit in concentration, mind blank of everything except the reddening of Betty’s ass, the satisfying slap of skin on skin, the way Betty fights between arching up into the pain and down onto Veronica’s leg.

“I love you,” she says, one hand pressed against the vulnerable small of Betty’s back, keeping her down. “So you’re just going to have to deal with that.” When Betty starts to speak, Veronica spanks her, and she goes quiet. It feels like a fight, the storm outside amplifying every jerk of Veronica’s shoulder, every soft cry that escapes Betty’s throat. Veronica doesn’t know who is winning.

She spanks Betty again and again, harder and harder, not noticing when she starts crying along with Betty, face red and wet as a frustrated toddler’s, not noticing how her hand begins to ache, only snapping back into herself when Betty sobs and yells and comes hard, comes from nothing but the hard attention of Veronica’s hand on her. Her ass clenches, begging to be touched and filled, but that can happen another day. The slash of her cunt is pink and pulsing, dripping down onto Veronica’s bare thigh, but Veronica doesn’t touch her. She doesn’t need to.

Veronica slips her fingers into Betty’s mouth, wanting her hot and wet at both ends, wanting to fill her, but when she expected Betty to suck on her, get her slick, Betty bites down on her thumb hard enough for Veronica to groan, hard enough for the pain to radiate to her cunt.

This is who Betty Cooper is, she thinks, the pain throbbing up her knuckles. I see her, and oh, god, she is so beautiful.

She jerks the knot loose around Betty’s hands, releasing her.

In a perfect moment, the rain would stop. The sun would come out. But the storm outside rages on, not knowing the storm inside the car is over.

“I guess I love you, too,” Betty says hoarsely, face pressed against the leather seat. Her hands are curled up against her chest like a sleepy child’s. She glances up at Veronica with vulnerable blue eyes, and Veronica thinks this is their moment, but then Betty begins to laugh. It vibrates through her body, sends crinkles to the corners of her eyes.

A clap of thunder sounds across town, and Veronica tilts her head back against the car seat and starts to laugh, too.